Ultimate Guide Social Media Semrush
Ultimate Guide Social Media Semrush
Ultimate Guide Social Media Semrush
Guide for
Social Media
Professionals
by SEMrush
Table of content
Introduction
1 Strategy
Set SMART Goals
Conduct Competitor Research
See What Your Audience is Responding to
Search for Strong Hashtags
2 Scheduling
Find the Best Times to Post
Utilize Scheduling Software to Post On Time
Set Up Queues So Content is Always Ready
Diversify Your Content Feeds
Conclusion
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Introduction
Strategy
Too many social media profiles from you’re abstractly trying to accomplish.
businesses and brands lack any
semblance of a strategy, which is a The first step of creating great social
critical mistake. All social campaigns media campaigns is therefore to
should have a strategy before they’re develop a strong strategy. This should
even developed into actual content. be a heavily research-based process
Without this, you won’t be optimizing which can be broken down into several
for specific results, and it’s likely that distinct stages. The first is setting
you’ll fall short of whatever goals clear goals.
Establishing SMART goals from the very beginning of your campaigns can be
immensely beneficial. SMART goals are:
Once you’ve decided what goals you want to accomplish, you can then begin
your research to decide what types of content would best help you reach them.
Start by looking closely at your competitors' content strategy. They may have
found a strategy that you haven’t discovered yet, or they may use certain types
of content (like link sharing or status posting) more effectively. After all, there
will be a lot of audience overlap here, so you can learn a lot from what your
competitors are doing well.
The Social Media Tracker lets you enter up to 20 different competitors, who you
can then track on every social media channel that they have. You can track the
number of their followers, activity levels, and changes in growth or engagement,
and you can see how you measure up.
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You’ll also be able to see which of their top content is currently performing better
(or worse) than yours. This can give you valuable insight into what types of
content your audience would rather be seeing, and give you new ideas for how
to approach content creation.
After you’ve taken a close look at what’s working for your competitors, examine
what’s already working for your pages and profiles if they’re already up and
running by using the Social Media Tracker’s Top Content reports.
In many cases, businesses will hire social media agencies or seek help once
they’ve got their pages up and running and have realized they need some help.
This can give you a baseline of content and data to start with about what’s
working for you or your client’s social media, along with what’s working for other
similar pages.
The Social Media Tracker allows you to analyze massive amounts of data about
your social contents’ performance on each individual channel. You’ll be able to
see specific performance metrics on each post, including:
• Which posts had the most engagement
• Which posts had the highest engagement rate
• Specific types of engagement, like comments, shares/retweets, or likes
• Mentions and top mentioners on Twitter
For each social network, there is an ‘Activity’ dashboard that helps you analyze
the frequency and nature of the content your competitors are posting, and see
how much engagement their posts are getting.
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Use all of this data to see which types of content your audience is most invested
in. For the client above, for example, you could determine that content with visual
components had significantly higher success rates than content without them.
Compile this information to develop your strategy for which types of content
you’ll use to accomplish your specific goals.
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Choosing strong hashtags will help you generate discussion and connect with
the right audience on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Google+. The right
hashtag will expand your reach exponentially. You should always try to include
at least one hashtag on Twitter, and between eight and eleven on Instagram for
best results.
The Social Media Tracker will help you identify your own and your competitors’
best performing hashtags on each individual platform, allowing you to discover
which are working best on individual platforms, since they’re unlikely to be the
same on each. The tool will show you how much engagement per post the
hashtags received, the number of posts your hashtags appeared in, and if they
were used by any of your competitors. You can also research which hashtags
your competitors use and incorporate some of the best ones into your own posts.
Create a list of your best performing hashtags and try to use some of them in
every Instagram post, and add one or two regularly to your Twitter content. This
will help you maintain your high reach while you test out other hashtags, too.
Scheduling
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Content Creation
Once you’ve developed your goal- you were just managing one client
driven, measurable strategies and account.
started generating content, it’s time to
dive in. Traditionally, posting content With the right process in place and the
to every platform for all of your clients’ right tools on hand, however, you can
social media was time consuming and streamline the social media posting
frustrating, and there were so many and scheduling process to get more
tabs it was far too easy for something results and reduce your workload at
to get missed. This was true even if the same time.
Before you actually start posting content, you’ll want to determine exactly what
times and days of the week you want to post. Timing does matter, after all, even
on the platforms that don’t organize content chronologically from the time they
were posted.
If you post at peak times, users are more likely to see it, after all, and give you that
initial surge of engagement that you need to give it a boost in the algorithms.
This will significantly impact the reach of those specific posts. With competition
in users’ feeds being higher than ever (and with that unlikely to change), any
boost you can give your content is a good thing.
When scheduling content for your Facebook pages in the Social Media Poster,
you’ll be able to see the times when your audience is most likely to be online and
schedule your posts accordingly.
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Gone are the days when you needed to worry about logging into each platform,
logging out of one profile and into another, with too many tabs open on your
screen. Now, you can utilize scheduling software so you can schedule social
posts all in one place.
When you’re scheduling posts through the Social Media Poster, you can set
them to be published to any combination of your social profiles, saving you a
significant amount of time. You can add images, GIFs, and links to your posts.
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You also have the choice to add these posts to your queue, post them
immediately, save them as drafts, or schedule them to be posted later.
You can use the scheduling software to plan your most important posts ahead
of time, especially those correlating to big announcements of special events, so
that you never miss an opportunity and all the content will be distributed equally
across each platform.
It also makes it much easier to create a cohesive social media editorial calendar,
which can be synced with your business objectives and events (such as product
releases or sales). You’ll never miss a single opportunity, and your campaigns’
results will improve because of this.
You don’t need to have timely content to post every single day, and that works
to your advantage. In many cases, it’s easier to spend one or two days a month
creating large stores of social media content that’s ready to post any time you
have a void to be filled, and that’s where social queues come in.
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The Social Media Poster’s queues tool is an excellent feature, allowing you to
both create specific posts that you want to be shared when there’s an empty
space in the schedule, and decide when exactly you’d like those queued posts to
go live. The social content queues are designed to make your life easier, as you
can make quick last-minute changes without needing to go through multiple
screens.
Queues will make your job as a content marketing manager significantly easier,
and you can schedule different times and dates for queued posts to go live for
each individual platform. Use this feature so that you’ll never run out of content
that’s ready to be posted as-is, and your social results will be much stronger
thanks to the consistency.
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Once you’ve found the brands that you want to share posts from, our Social Media
Poster will allow you to set up RSS feeds that can help you post external content
from these brands to your client’s own social profiles. The feeds will automatically
be updated with all new content from any given brand’s RSS feeds, which you
can then share to your business’s or your clients’ profiles with just a few clicks.
You can schedule these posts just like you would any other content, with additional
options available to publish them immediately or put them into the queue.
This will allow you to build stronger relationships with other brands in your field, and
it can give you additional sources of content that you know your audience will love.
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Analytics
& Optimization
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After you’ve implemented your new strategies and have gotten your campaigns
up and running, your job still isn’t over (especially not as a social media
professional doing ongoing work for multiple clients). You need to find accurate,
detailed analytics and understand how to interpret them in order to optimize
your campaigns moving forward. This will allow you to do more of what’s
working for you, and cut what isn’t. You’ll also be able to adjust and formulate
new strategies based on the data at hand.
The Social Media Tracker will help you track and evaluate how your content is
performing, and why. You can look at exact engagement rates, along with the
different types of engagement on each post. You can see whether your users
are still preferring photo over video, or links over no links.
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As you’re doing this, look closely at your results and examine whether they show
progress towards your goal. If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, for
example, you would want to look at the number of mentions you’re getting on
Twitter, and who is mentioning you.
Your social media campaigns, after all, were all built around specific, measurable
goals that were designed to help you achieve specific business objectives for
your clients. Vanity metrics such as likes can be nice and make your clients
happy, but they’re often not enough to help reach goals like brand awareness,
lead nurturing, or increased conversions.
Just because your content is up and running doesn’t mean your competitor
research should be done. Instead, you want to track how your campaigns are
affecting your ranking against your competition. Are your engagement rates
increasing? Have you surpassed them, or are they still getting more followers
and more results?
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Keeping an eye on your competitors over time can help clue you in to any big
changes they’ve made, like new events they’re hosting. Are you posting as
frequently as they are? Are you posting less frequently but still getting more
results? Take all of this into consideration to see how you can pull ahead if you
haven’t already. It’s always important to keep one eye on your competition, so
utilize the Social Media Tracker to do so.
You can also use this report to see what’s happening in that particular industry or
niche, looking for peaks and trends. Typically, a peak in posting means that your
competitors have launched a new marketing campaign or announced an event
that they wanted to attract a lot of attention. This can give you a quick indicator
to go check out their big event or campaign to see what you can learn from it.
You may also make discoveries that surprise you. You could, for example,
discover that every time one of your competitors goes live, their engagement
jumps, getting at least three times as many comments and reactions. Look at
all this data to see what you can learn.
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Conclusion
Was this guide helpful? Did it answer all of your questions? Are
there any other features you would like to see in our tools? Shoot
us a message at [email protected] and let us
know!
semrush.com